19-letter words containing l, i, t, u, n
- perpetual inventory — a form of stock control in which running records are kept of all acquisitions and disposals
- persecution complex — an acute irrational fear that other people are plotting one's downfall and that they are responsible for one's failures
- persian gulf states — group of Arab sheikdoms along the Persian Gulf: Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, & United Arab Emirates
- phacoemulsification — the removal of a cataract by first liquefying the affected lens with ultrasonic vibrations and then extracting it by suction.
- phakoemulsification — the removal of a cataract by first liquefying the affected lens with ultrasonic vibrations and then extracting it by suction.
- phthalocyanine blue — a pigment used in painting, derived from copper phthalocyanine and characterized chiefly by its brilliant, dark-blue color and by permanence.
- physical sequential — (file format) (PS, QSAM, Queued Sequential Access Method) The simplest data set on an IBM mainframe. Sequential files can only be read or written from the beginning: they do not support random access.
- pointe-aux-trembles — a city in S Quebec, in E Canada, N of Montreal, on the St. Lawrence.
- popular sovereignty — the doctrine that sovereign power is vested in the people and that those chosen to govern, as trustees of such power, must exercise it in conformity with the general will.
- population genetics — the branch of genetics concerned with the hereditary makeup of populations.
- population pressure — the force exerted by a growing population upon its environment, resulting in dispersal or reduction of the population.
- preproduction model — a prototype of a product before the product goes into full-scale production
- preproduction trial — a trial to test a prototype of a product before the product goes into full-scale production
- priority scheduling — (operating system) Processes scheduling in which the scheduler selects tasks to run based on their priority as opposed to, say, a simple round-robin. Priorities may be static or dynamic. Static priorities are assigned at the time of creation, while dynamic priorities are based on the processes' behaviour while in the system. For example, the scheduler may favour I/O-intensive tasks so that expensive requests can be issued as early as possible. A danger of priority scheduling is starvation, in which processes with lower priorities are not given the opportunity to run. In order to avoid starvation, in preemptive scheduling, the priority of a process is gradually reduced while it is running. Eventually, the priority of the running process will no longer be the highest, and the next process will start running. This method is called aging.
- production platform — offshore power station
- pseudo-experimental — pertaining to, derived from, or founded on experiment: an experimental science.
- pseudo-intellectual — a person exhibiting intellectual pretensions that have no basis in sound scholarship.
- public intellectual — an intellectual, often a noted specialist in a particular field, who has become well-known to the general public for a willingness to comment on current affairs
- public-interest law — a branch of law that often utilizes class-action suits to protect the interest of a large group or of the public at large, as in matters relating to racial discrimination, air pollution, etc.
- quantum electronics — the application of quantum mechanics and quantum optics to the study and design of electronic devices
- queen's regulations — (in Britain and certain other Commonwealth countries when the sovereign is female) the code of conduct for members of the armed forces
- reconceptualization — to form into a concept; make a concept of.
- recurrence relation — (mathematics) An equation that defines each element of a sequence in terms of one or more earlier elements. E.g. The Fibonacci sequence, X[1] = 1 X[2] = 1 X[n] = X[n-1] + X[n-2] Some recurrence relations can be converted to "closed form" where X[n] is defined purely in terms of n, without reference to earlier elements.
- reduction potential — (in a galvanic cell) the potential of the electrode at which reduction occurs.
- reindustrialization — the revitalization of an industry or industrial society through government aid and tax incentives, modernization of factories and machinery, etc.
- relational calculus — (database) An operational methodolgy, founded on predicate calculus, dealing with descripitive expressions that are equivalent to the operations of relational algebra. Codd's reduction algorithm can convert from relational calculus to relational algebra. Two forms of the relational calculus exist: the tuple calculus and the domain calculus.
- relational language — (language) Any kind of programming language that specifies output in terms of some property and some arguments. For example, if Tom has two brothers, Dick and Harry, a relational language will respond to the query "Who is Tom's brother?" with either Dick or Harry. Notice that unlike functional languages, relational languages do not require a unique output for each predicate/argument pair. Prolog is the best known relational language.
- religious education — religion as school subject
- republic of vietnam — the name (from 1955–75) for South Vietnam, as an independent republic, following the division of the country in 1954 into North Vietnam and South Vietnam
- reticular formation — a network of neurons in the brainstem involved in consciousness, regulation of breathing, the transmission of sensory stimuli to higher brain centers, and the constantly shifting muscular activity that supports the body against gravity.
- reticuloendothelial — pertaining to, resembling, or involving cells of the reticuloendothelial system.
- rhetorical question — a question asked solely to produce an effect or to make an assertion and not to elicit a reply, as “What is so rare as a day in June?”.
- right circular cone — a cone whose surface is generated by lines joining a fixed point to the points of a circle, the fixed point lying on a perpendicular through the center of the circle.
- right-eyed flounder — any of several flatfishes of the family Pleuronectidae, having both eyes on the right side of the head.
- run-length encoding — A kind of compression algorithm which replaces sequences ("runs") of consecutive repeated characters (or other units of data) with a single character and the length of the run. This can either be applied to all input characters, including runs of length one, or a special character can be used to introduce a run-length encoded group. The longer and more frequent the runs are, the greater the compression that will be achieved. This technique is particularly useful for encoding black and white images where the data units would be single bit pixels.
- saint luke's summer — a period of unusually warm weather in the autumn
- screen actors guild — a labor union for motion-picture performers, founded in 1933. Abbreviation: SAG.
- sea of tranquillity — Astronomy. Mare Tranquillitatis.
- secondary qualities — one of the qualities attributed by the mind to an object perceived, such as color, temperature, or taste.
- self-congratulating — the expression or feeling of uncritical satisfaction with oneself or one's own accomplishment, good fortune, etc.; complacency.
- self-congratulation — the expression or feeling of uncritical satisfaction with oneself or one's own accomplishment, good fortune, etc.; complacency.
- self-reconstruction — an act of reconstructing.
- semibituminous coal — a coal intermediate between bituminous and anthracite coal in hardness, yielding the maximum heat of any ordinary steam coal.
- semiconductor laser — a laser in which a semiconductor is the light-emitting source, used in many medical procedures.
- seminiferous tubule — any of the coiled tubules of the testis in which spermatozoa are produced.
- senatorial courtesy — the practice in the U.S. Senate of confirming only those presidential appointees approved by both senators from the state of the appointee, or by the senior senator of the president's party.
- sentential calculus — the branch of symbolic logic dealing with the logical relationships between statements insofar as they can be analyzed into conjunctions, disjunctions, and negations of more elementary statements.
- sentential function — an expression that contains one or more variables and becomes meaningful when suitable constant terms are substituted for them.
- sequential analysis — the analysis of data obtained from a sample the size of which is not fixed in advance, but is selected based on the outcome of the sampling as it proceeds.
- sequential scanning — a system of scanning a television picture along the lines in numerical sequence